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NEPAD’s development partnership with Kenya

The Kenyan Government has expressed its continued commitment and support to the implementation of NEPAD Programmes.

Senior officials from the National Treasury and Agriculture Ministries, in a briefing to a NEPAD Agency delegation in Nairobi highlighted the status of some of its projects and development priorities.

Mr Justus Nyamunga, Director for Economic Affairs at the National Treasury said that the forth-coming multi-sector Dakar Financing Summit in December to be hosted by the Government of Senegal, NEPAD and other partners was very relevant; considering that 85 per cent of Kenya’s national budget is derived from domestic resources.

Kenya is also in the forefront in regional integration, demonstrated by its leading role in driving regional trade, road and rail networks and infrastructure knowledge such as cross border listings between Uganda and Tanzania.

“We would also like to drive more interaction and trade between the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) and COMESA, the Common Market for East and Southern Africa,” said Mr Nyamunga.

Mr Nyamunga attributed the success of some of Kenya’s fiscal policy to the bottom-up approach.

“A significant portion of our development allows our tax payers to put pressure on us for transparency and accountability. We have put in place measures to ensure that every sector of our society grows, for the sake of equitable development,” said Nyamunga.

The NEPAD team led by Director of Corporate Services Bankole Adeoye is in Kenya with two high level consultants to meet with government departments, civil society and international organisations on how to improve NEPAD’s coordinating structures. Through funding from the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), the two consultants - Ambassador Olukorede Willoughby former NEPAD acting CEO and Mr Ibrahima Mbaye, Senegal’s former Minister in charge of NEPAD, will identify the main focal points with whom NEPAD will work to map its structures, update the database on these focal points and provide guidelines on their role.

In agriculture, Kenya has been implementing the NEPAD Agenda through the Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Programme (CAADP) which has been informing policy on agricultural priorities. Some of the key points include a one million acre irrigation infrastructure system in the country’s semi-arid area and moving the strategic food reserve to the Agriculture ministry.

“Although Kenya has allocated on 5% of its national budget to agriculture, in a broader sense, there’s a lot more funding going to infrastructure and water management systems which are designed to support agricultural development,” said Mr Kenneth Ayugo, who is in charge of policy development in Kenya’s Agriculture Ministry.